Case Studies

At Vrbo (previously known as HomeAway), a company part of Expedia, I focused on designing and advocating for locally-relevant products.

Vrbo acquired a local Singaporean vacation rental marketplace startup called Travelmob in 2015. I joined in October 2016. In my first six months, working with other two designers, we designed localized versions of our mobile apps and website (legacy of Travelmob), which included core initiatives like accounts page, checkout and payment, instant booking feature, and iOS mobile app. Other than the business-as-usual items, we also envisioned some future concepts like chatbots and collaborative decision platform. By the end of it, we all had to work to integrate to the global Vrbo platform, and collaborate with the global product, engineering and design team based in Austin, Texas. For design team, this involved strategic design decisions like how we could launch regional domains (like Singapore’s, Japan’s or Sri Lanka’s) with the global experience. The HomeAway headquarter teams have much less experience in penetrating these local markets, and sought our expertise in building international sites. We even conducted a design research in Japan to validate our assumptions and ideas, the first of its kind in the history of Vrbo.

At DBS Bank, I helped kickstart the in-house design team and set the standards for the future.

DBS Bank has engaged a big-name product design consultant for a long time to support their consumer-facing digital business, but they decided to hire a full-time team of in-house designers. They started this in 2014 by hiring a Senior Vice President, Design. After a while, they started to hire more, and I was the 4th designer to be onboarded.

At that stage, design maturity was in its infancy, and the design team had to break through many things including establishing a strong user experience process, advocating for the users through user research in the lab, educating business and tech stakeholders on the importance of design and in general, building a good product development culture. I was one of the earlier team members who helped set the standards for user experience design, by being the first designers to be fully embedded in projects like internet banking and mobile banking. Read more about it!

At Bukalapak, I helped a seed-funded startup get off the ground with its first design overhaul.

When I joined, the now unicorn-valued Indonesian startup was still in its infancy. I was asked to join as its first time user experience design lead, working to redesign the platform into the next phase. In its first days the company had no design process, and I helped to establish a standard for the future. This started with interviewing all the internal stakeholders, like the CTO, CEO, product manager, business analyst and engineers. Then, we set expectations with weekly or biweekly update to carve out business and user requirements. Transparency and iteration were the key ingredients. It took a while, but we launched our redesigned version in less than a year, and we were excited to see positive responses from our users. Read more about it!